Rwanda was definitely a bucket list trip for me. Wendy and I have a house in VA on the New River that we call Villa Gorilla. I'm a big Warren Zevon fan he came out with a song in 1980 on his album, "Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School" called "Gorilla You're a Desperado". The song is about swapping places with a gorilla at the zoo and it includes the lyric:

  He built a house on an acre of land
  He called it Villa Gorilla

Great song. Great artist. Damn good name for a house.

We have a couple of pieces of legit art there including an oil painting by Jason Morgan that I call "Desperado" and a tabletop bronze of a Silverback by Alan Hamwi called "Unlikely Friends". I want to add a print of my own to the decor.

Rwanda was daunting for me because of course I had heard about the genocide (1994) in which over a million people were slaughtered in about 100 days. That does not sound like a good place to visit. But if you want to see mountain gorillas then your other two choices are Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo. Neither is particularly safe and both have an Ebola outbreak currently. Rwanda was a complete (and pleasant) surprise. It is orderly, clean, and the people are great. They face their history with the genocide head on. It is a remarkable transformation story for the country.

BCJ and Grant Ordelheide put together the trip and Grant has done it before. Good enough for me. Wendy bowed out. Seeing the mountain gorillas involves a pretty good walk, unsurprisingly, up a mountain. Damn. That was real. GeoTracker said it was 6.5 miles round trip and that the climb was over 1400 feet of elevation. No wonder I was tired. I trained for it and I did barely enough to survive it. I'm glad I didn't wait a couple more years. I'm not getting any younger.